Scion of movie actress Francesca Bertini and pioneering Italian director
Vincenzo Leone (aka Roberto Roberti), Sergio Leone merged his movie-made
dreams of America with his own brand of epic myth-making to create a quartet
of 1960s Westerns so exceptional that they earned their own generic moniker.
Though initially derided as nihilistically violent spaghetti Westerns,
A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly (1966) galvanized the floundering genre, turning
Leone into an international directorial star. Following his spectacular
iron horse opera Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), however, Leone directed
only two more movies before his death in 1989. Though he helmed a mere
seven films, Leone's enormous influence was apparent from the late '60s
onward, from Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, and of course
Clint Eastwood, who dedicated his Unforgiven (1992) "To Sergio and
Don." Born and raised in Rome, Leone adored Hollywood movies as a
child. Despite his father's insistence that he study law, Leone began
a parallel education in filmmaking at age 18 through family connections.
After working on several films, including Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves
(1947), Leone quit school to pursue a movie career full time. Buoyed by
the peplum film vogue, Leone worked as an assistant director throughout
the 1950s at Cinecittà, including on the Hollywood spectacles Quo
Vadis? (1951), Ben-Hur (1959), and Sodom and Gomorrah (1961). Leone got
his first shot at directing when he took over The Last Days of Pompeii
(1959) from ailing mentor Mario Bonnard, and earned his first "directed
by" credit with another peplum, The Colossus of Rhodes (1960). Leery
of being pigeonholed, Leone didn't direct another feature until 1964.
Leone found his next project after seeing Akira Kurosawa's samurai film
Yojimbo (1961) in 1963. With the westernization of The Seven Samurai (1954)
as The Magnificent Seven (1960) as precedent, and the first European Westerns
hitting theaters, Leone adapted Yojimbo as a low-budget Western to be
shot in Spain. Low on the list of possible Americans to play Leone's Magnificent
Stranger was a TV actor whom Leone cast more out of financial necessity
than desire; and his composer, one-time schoolmate Ennio Morricone, made
do with limited orchestra access. The result, re-titled A Fistful of Dollars
(1964), turned out to be a wildly popular re-imagining of the hallowed
Western myths, centering on a bloody conflict involving rival families
and a sly gunslinger. Peppered with widescreen close-ups transforming
faces into craggy "landscapes," and accompanied by a bizarre
soundtrack of surf guitar, sound effects, and folk instruments, Fistful
did away with the hoary sentiment, pastoral settings, and recent neurosis
of Hollywood oaters. Though they would feud later over credit for their
singularly accessorized gunfighter, Leone and Clint Eastwood's Man With
No Name -- or Man With No Set Name -- became an indelible portrait of
taciturn skill, humor, and pragmatic brutality. A hit in Italy, Fistful
inspired scores of spaghetti Westerns but few had the personal obsessions
with prior movie myth-making that gave Leone's genre pictures artistic
heft. Though the U.S. release of Fistful was delayed by rights problems
over Yojimbo, its European run was so successful that Leone was pushed
to quickly make a sequel. Puckishly titled For a Few Dollars More (1965),
Leone and co-writer Luciano Vincenzoni expanded the ironic view of the
West in a story involving two bounty hunters and a psychotic stoner bandit.
Larger in scope and length, For a Few Dollars More paired Eastwood's bounty-hunting
Man with Lee Van Cleef, whose personal motivation for his mercenary violence
is revealed aurally through Morricone's textured score and visually in
flashbacks that lead up to the climactic "corrida" showdown
with Gian Maria Volonté's bandit. As violent as its predecessor
and ending with Eastwood tallying up his monetary gains, For a Few Dollars
More broke box-office records in Italy, paving the way for the even more
expansive sequel The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). A Civil War epic
starring Eastwood, Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach in the respective title
roles, The Good's quest for gold included numerous dark jokes, venal ruses,
and an elaborate bridge explosion on the way to the famously dramatic,
three-way graveyard showdown. Yet another hit, The Good, the Bad and the
Ugly sealed Leone's status as the premiere Italian Western director. Released
in the U.S. in 1967 and 1968, the Dollars trilogy repeated its European
success, turning Eastwood into a major star and Leone into a critical
pariah for his alleged desecration of the Western. Nevertheless, the trilogy
revived Hollywood's interest in the ailing genre and opened the door for
a new cycle of critical Westerns, including Peckinpah's violent masterwork
The Wild Bunch (1969). Given carte blanche to make another Western by
Paramount, Leone embarked on a film meant to be his farewell to the genre.
Working from a treatment by fellow cinéastes Bernardo Bertolucci
and Dario Argento, and a script co-written with Sergio Donati entitled
the ultra-legendary Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Leone created
an epic canvas encompassing archetypal characters and the railroad to
augment the personal conflict between Charles Bronson's nameless "hero"
and Henry Fonda's killer. Replete with references to Hollywood Westerns,
including John Ford's signature Monument Valley, West transformed the
path of Progress into a trail of death, beginning with the mini-epic credit
sequence that Leone envisioned as the demise of his Good, Bad and Ugly
stars. When Eastwood declined, Leone enlisted Woody Strode and Jack Elam.
Shot to the majestic rhythms of Morricone's score, punctuated by elusive
flashbacks and extreme close-ups, and drawn out to operatic length, Once
Upon a Time in the West performed decently in Europe -- and became one
of France's biggest all-time hits -- but was deemed fatally slow by American
viewers. Though Paramount pulled the film and chopped 25 minutes, West
flopped. While he had decided to stop directing Westerns, Leone was intrigued
enough by the spaghettis' increasing politicization in the late '60s to
co-write a screenplay with Vincenzoni and Donati about a Mexican peasant
who meets an ex-IRA bomber during the Mexican Revolution. After failing
to find a director -- Peter Bogdanovich made a rough early exit -- Leone
agreed to do it. Released under such fan-friendly titles as Once Upon
a Time, the Revolution and A Fistful of Dynamite, Duck, You Sucker! (1972)
benefited from Rod Steiger and James Coburn's presence, and Leone's facility
with action, but it too failed. Leone didn't direct another film for over
a decade, turning down such projects as The Godfather (1972). After spending
the 1970s producing films, Leone finally managed to mount his long-gestating
gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984). A sprawling meditation
on Hollywood gangster mythology, America was intended to do for the gangster
film what West did for the Western. Starring Robert De Niro and James
Woods as two 1920s Jewish hoods, Leone told the story of their rise and
fall through an atmospheric tapestry of flashbacks, scored by Morricone,
that becomes as much an homage to the possibilities of cinema as an opium-addled
criminal's potential fantasy. Or that's what America was in the full-length,
three-hour-and-49-minute version that debuted to great acclaim at the
Cannes Film Festival. The nervous American producers, however, hacked
over an hour and 20 minutes out of the film before releasing it stateside.
Reduced to an incomprehensible mess, Once Upon a Time in America flopped
in America. Despite this artistic blow and a heart disease diagnosis,
Leone began to plan an ambitious film about the WWII siege of Leningrad,
even securing the Soviets' cooperation. This project, and a Western intended
as a vehicle for Mickey Rourke and Richard Gere, however, were ended by
Leone's death in February 1989. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide